Bank of America

For those needing yet another reminder of how in America the incestuous conflicts of interest between the various branches of government and Wall Street run to the very top, here is Time with an article highlighting yet another example of impropriety. Today's case focuses on Iowa’s Democratic Attorney General Tom Miller, who at least superficially took the noble lead on the investigation by all 50 state attorneys general into the “robo-signing” foreclosure scandal. Alas, one look below the surface reveals that we may be days away from a very ignoble and very BAC-friendly settlement, courtesy of a few backroom "arrangements" brought to you by none other than Bank of America's petty cash account.

Bank of America continues crawling along the razor's edge, with the biggest threat to its continued business model: ongoing legacy CFC fraud being largely unprovisioned for. In the just released earnings presentation, we learn that the bank provisioned only $1 billion for its ongoing Reps and Warranties liability, after charging off a minuscule $238 million - the lowest in over a year, bringing its total liability accrual to $6.2 billion. Yet over the same period total outstanding claims by counterparty surged by nearly 30%, from $10.7 billion to $13.6 billion, primarily due to GSEs, although the steady putback rise in monoline GSE claims is relentless (and appears to have gotten to the bank considering the just announced Assured Guaranty settlement, see below). Total outstanding claims at the end of Q1 totalled $13.6 billion. Also someone please explain to us how Merrill Lynch (see footnote
2) is one of the parties responsible for filing new claims against its
parent and rescuer Bank of America. As for a real world example of just what the real cost of these
liabilities is in a full discharge scenario, we have the just announce
settlement with Assured Guaranty which cost the company $1.1 billion to
settle loss-sharing reinsurance arrangement on 21 first
lien RMBS transactions totalling $4.8 billion net par. In other
words the settlements that are about to be announce with MBIA and other
monolines could possibly be in the double digits, crushing BAC's earnings in whatever quarter they are announced.

Just as JP Morgan, Bank of America takes accounting manipulation to the next degree and lowers its credit loss provision to $3.8 billion, down $6.0 billion from a year earlier, and $2.3 billion from Q4, even though the actual amount of charge offs sequentially barely declined from $6.7 billion to $6.0 billion. "The provision for credit losses was $3.8 billion, which was $6.0 billion lower than the same period a year earlier. The provision was lower than net charge-offs, resulting in a $2.2 billion reduction in the allowance for loan and lease losses, including the reserve for unfunded commitments, in the first quarter of 2011 (net of reserve additions of $1.6 billion related to consumer-purchased credit-impaired portfolios as noted below). This compares with a $1.0 billion reduction in the first quarter of 2010." Even so, the company still was unable to goal seek its EPS consensus of $0.26, coming in at $0.17. Without this accounting gimmick, BAC would have had a sizable loss in Q1.

“By doing this we will send a resounding message that government officials are no longer going to stand by and continue to allow MERS and their joint venture banking partners to profit at the expense of the very same people that they are abusing."

And so the biggest scam organization's dirty laundry get exposed by even the porn-addicted regulator.

• BOFA LOAN POLICY MAY HAVE BEEN INCONSISTENT WITH INDUSTRY
• SEC RELEASES 2010 LETTER TO BOFA ON N0NPERFORMING LOANS
• BOFA WAS PRESSED BY SEC ON DISCLOSURE OF NONPERFORMING LOANS

Oh, so they were lying? No....

BofA's chief chartist Mary Ann Bartels chimed in on last week's market correction, in which as many observed, the market briefly dipped to unchanged for 2011. As Bartels points out, with the August uptrend now breached, and various technical supports taken out, there is a possibility for another 10% drop in the broader index. Of course, it wouldn't be a Bank of America report if the conclusion was not the one and only permitted one: BTFD.

Two days ago, as was extensively reported by Zero Hedge, an Anonymous operative leaked various emails by Bank of America employees indicating a wilful and malicious intent to lie to auditors, regulators and the government. Many of the less than informed in the media space were quick to condemn this act as a lot of hot air, without having the faintest clue about the legal implications of the alleged activity. Luckily, a special agent for SIGTARP was not as quick to dismiss the data simply because it did not contain an HD video of the bank's CEO participating in a snuff film. As Operation LeakS has just released, a special agent for SIGTARP, which after spending millions in taxpayer capital has still to put anyone in jail, will investigate these allegations. It certainly is a start, even if the same taxpayers who pay for the SIGTARP program also have to do the SIGTARP's work for them. Very much like the SEC.

After Julian Assange crashed and burned in his threat to release documents that expose fraud at Bank of America, many thought he had been only bluffing, and that BofA is actually clean. Not so fast. A member of the hacker collective Anonymous, which singlehandedly destroyed "hacker defense" firm HB Gary, who goes under the handle OperationLeakS "is claiming to be have emails and documents which prove "fraud" was
committed by Bank of America employees, and the group says it'll release
them on Monday" reports Gawker. As to the contents of the possible disclosure: ""He Just
told me he have GMAC emails showing BoA order to mix loan numbers to not
match it's Documents. to foreclose on Americans.. Shame." If indeed this makes the case against BofA' foreclosure practices stronger, it certainly explains why the banking consortium is scrambling to arrange a settlement, and also why Bank of America recently split off its $2 trillion in mortgages into "good bank" and "bad bank" entities.

From Bank of America's Guy Moszkowski, who confirms our views that continuing subdued market participation (or as Guy calls it "market engagement") remains subdued, arguably due to the Bernanke Put which means stock market volatility is a thing of the past, at least until days in which war appears imminent: "Downgrading Citi and GS to Neutral. POs cut. Common denominator: expected weakness in Q1:11 results. Results unlikely to be dismal, and should show improvement over Q4, but we don’t expect seasonal improvement as strong as often seen in the past. Client engagement remains subdued, Mid-East turmoil likely only to further reduce customer risk appetite. Thus we are making significant cuts to our forecasts, and expect consensus to decline over the coming weeks. Increasingly, we believe investors will look to the theme of improving cash flow/return of capital via dividends/ buybacks, and also to play financials that are less–or even positively – affected by restrictions on banks such as Volcker Rules." - BofA/ML

Perhaps it is time for JP Morgan to revise its estimate for putback liability claims. As a reminder back in October, it was none other than JP Morgan which said: "We estimate putback risk to be approximately $23-$35bn for agency mortgages, $40-80bn in non-agency and roughly $20-30bn for second liens and HELOCs. However, there are a number of reasons why these estimates are on the high end, including losses already taken and loss reserves established." Well, there appear to be a number of reasons of why these estimates may have been on the very low end as well, the first one being that the bank itself just announced "it faces up to $4.5 billion in legal losses, in excess of its established litigation reserves, should its worst-case legal scenario occur." And if JP Morgan is seeing billion more in putback exposure, then what should Bank of Countrywide Lynch say, which just reported that the amount of debt which is being put against the firm for fraud of various types has just doubled from $46 billion to $84 billion. Luckily, according to a DebtWire report, PIMCO and BlackRock are actively doing the Fed's bidding in attempting to form a splinter group within the putback litigants and to settle with BofA for a nominal charge. Will the Fed be once again successful at subverting justice?

Ever since the advent of QE2, few if any, sellside analysts employed by Too Big To Fail banks have dared to voice a negative opinion of the Chairman's third mandate, that of raising stock prices (for obvious reasons: nobody will bite the hand that feeds them trillion in taxpayer bailout money). Which is why we continue to believe the BofA credit strategist Jeffrey Rosenberg is one of the few men standing who dares to call it how it is. In his latest piece, Rosenberg lays out what is the most harshly (yet diplomatically) worded criticism of QE we have read to date. "In our view, the longer term problem with such a strategy is that in delaying the adjustment to the root causes of the credit crisis, namely excessive leverage in the economy and financial markets, the essential vulnerabilities from that excessive leverage remain. What triggers their realization again is the inflationary shock leading to an interest rate shock that undermines the cheap cost of that debt that currently enables its maintenance." As for the implicit assumption that savings and wealth are inversely correlated, Rosenberg points out the glaringly obvious: "Inflation erodes the value of those savings and decreases their standard of living." The only option left: "Lowering the value of savings creates a powerful incentive to take on investment risk to maintain the real purchasing power of those savings." And while everyone getting aboard the investment ship at the same time is a horrible idea when it happens in one country, it is a guaranteed disaster waiting to happen when it occurs at the global level. Which is precisely what has happened: "Today, we see that same pattern again at play. But this time, it’s not limited to just the US Fed policy. Globally, central banks are pursuing coincident easy money policies. And even in Emerging Markets where the inflation fears stand most acute, the policy rate increases are just keeping  up with inflation increases. The result: global negative or zero real policy rates." The entire global "economy", which really means stock market, is now one timebomb, just waiting for the first central banker error-induced 'crack' to appear in the windshield, following which the destruction will be unprecedented.

And so the latest shoe to drop in robosigning falls. Diana Olick reports that BofA has stopped its issuing notices of default in non-judicial states, such as the all critical California and Arizona, which explains the dramatic drop off in NODs in January. Previously explained by Koolaid guzzlers as an indication of economic improvement, it turns out this was merely yet more fraud being perpetrated by the big banks, which are now trying to cover up their slime trail. According to Bank of America's Dan Frahm, "We did conduct a review of the Notice of Default process. As a result we stopped the NOD process in non-judicial states." And so the double dip just got far worse.

The benchmark for documented mortgage originators' lies is getting higher and higher. First it was the Allstate lawsuit, finding massive fraud in most Countrywide/Bank of America loans, then it was quantified at 70% after Wells Fargo sued JPM's EMC division, now it is all the way up to 91% after a just released lawsuit by the bulk of the world's biggest insurance companies has been made public, in a fresh lawsuit again Bank of America/Countrywide over "Massive mortgage fraud." 

Three months ago, in light of the then released news that various parties among which the New York Fed and PIMCO are seeking to putback $47 billion worth of mortgages to Bank of America, we looked at the bank's reserve for reps and warranties and came to the conclusion that it was woefully underreserved (see: Can You Spell U-N-D-E-R-R-E-S-E-R-V-E-D? If Not, Here Is A Visualization Aid). Today, to our complete lack of surprise, we find that the Bank's reserve for such demands has exploded nearly five fold to a number that is probably the highest in history, at $4,140 million compared to a tiny $872 million in Q3, primarily driven by the settlement by Fannie and its sell out General Counsel Tim Maoypoulos. This is also the main reason for the bank's huge "charge" today which caused Earnings to be well below expectations. That said, that particular settlement is just the beginning of the firm's putback woes. Of course, what the bank is doing here is pretending this is a one time charge and hoping investors will give it credit for the Q3 number being the trendline, as opposed to the Q4, when it is precisely the reverse. Furthermore, we predict that soon enough declining reserves in all other categories will soon be reversed much higher as the sad reality of the US consumer, who has already extracted all benefits from not paying a mortgage, will become very evident and bank charge off ratios will be the first to suffer.